


Re.

by queen_insane



Category: Casino Royale (2006), James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: (but in passing), Alternate Universe - Canon, Canon Het Relationship, Canonical Character Death, Dark!James Bond, F/M, M/M, Not Bond or Silva
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 05:52:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_insane/pseuds/queen_insane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU retelling of both Skyfall and the history of the Craig Bond movies. <i>"Younger than thirteen is too young to leave a home James decides. But not too young to begin planning revenge."</i> James isn't the good little solider everyone expects him to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Re.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mechanicaljewel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechanicaljewel/gifts).



> Written for a 00Silva Fic Exchange. Thus, it was edited myself and all mistakes are mine.

When James is a young boy, while his mother is away, his papa takes him horse riding. Eventually they ride far enough that their home looks like a dollhouse. Sitting side by side on their horses his papa looks at him, “We’re going to change the world, our family.”

James thinks it sounds nice, so he smiles up at his papa. 

The words are a promise - but they are not nice.

James does not know this.

\----

He ages out of being a boy into an awkward pre-teen. His father takes him shooting, teaches him how to pick out a bird in the sky. He stops calling his papa, papa, and his mother ma. He is eleven and thinks he owns the world. Everything smells like gun oil, and gunpowder. It’s comforting and like home. 

Under his father’s large hands he learns how to load a rifle. They stay laying on the ground and the dirt, tracking the birds and shooting them down one after another. It grows colder as the day lengthens, and the sky starts to look like rain. James looks at his father as the sun disappears behind a cloud, he looks like he’s on fire, “Where does mother go when she goes on those long trips?”

His father looks at him, an odd look on his face, as if he’s proud, but not willing to share why yet, “She’s fighting back against those who would wish to harm us.”

“Who’s trying to harm us?” Sometimes James doesn’t understand what comes out of his father’s mouth.

“Those who would take everything and give nothing back.” His father ruffles his hair and James swats the hand away, he’s too old for that now.

Adult riddles are not something James understands, but he knows his father will tell him when he’s older.

\----

One day, near his twelfth birthday his mother goes out and doesn’t come back. He waits near the door the day his father said she was to return, reading a book until it gets dark. Eventually his father gets a call on the phone and comes to draw him back into the house. Something about the way he walks seems tired. James sits at the table as his father tells him a story of how long ago, there was a family of spies, that after a long time working for the government were hunted down and killed - just for knowing too much. Government regime changes can be deadly he tells James. It’s not something anyone should let stand, he continues, vengeance should be swift, carried out with no fear.

That’s the night his mother dies. 

\----

Kincade becomes his watcher soon after his mother dies. His father disappearing more frequently, day after day, night after night. Eventually it’s like he never had a father, just a shadow he knows loves him. He knows his by how he will wake up sometimes before Kincade, and there will be fresh tea for him on the table. Or how he will find books by his bed, books about espionage, about government, english history, foreign language. He devours these books as Kincade continues to teach him how to shoot deadlier guns, efficiency in movement - everything he does, how to speak properly as to not sound like he’s from the country. 

He’s sure what they are training him for isn’t exactly normal, the boys at his school are not learning these things he’s sure. They only talk about cars and girls and useless things. But it never mattered to him. Once he found his mother’s secret journal, and learned the story his father told him the night his mother died wasn’t exactly a story, he decided it didn’t matter. His family wasn’t normal anyway.

\----

A little less than a year after his mother dies his father too goes out one morning and doesn’t return. Unlike his father who received a phone call, a small woman comes to his house. She is old and her hair is a mix of brown and gray. Her face is serious, not a trace of humor. The black car she drives is followed by two other nondescript cars. When he answers the door she smiles at him sadly. 

He hates her, James decides then. This is the woman he is sure had his parents killed. Hates her more as she weaves a story about terrorism, about his parents, how terrible it is that they left him all alone. Her speech is full of sympathy words and phrases like: can be saved, prodigy, freedom, new life, and reform. The state has already granted her custody over him. 

Younger than thirteen is too young to leave a home James decides. But not too young to begin planning revenge.

\----

Years breed complacency. James is a good little soldier, and while he’s sure M - that’s the name of the woman who took him from home, gave him the 007 title to keep him close at hand, it also shows that she has forgotten where he came from. James is a man now, smarter and more cunning than he was as a child. He wears a suit, a giuse. Women, booze, these are just surface level things he does to pass the time. They don’t mean anything. Training has left scars but it has also hardened him. He fears little now, not even death.

\----

In Vesper he sees something he didn’t understand he wanted - freedom. She soothes the vengeance inside of him. For a fleeting moment he thinks maybe he doesn’t have to revenge himself and his family. That perhaps there is something beyond M, beyond his parents death. Something warm and beautiful. Vesper reminds him of the heart of England.

It’s only after her betrayal that he understands why. England is lovely and beautiful, but it is also dreary and full of rain. England is a trick of the light, nothing more. 

\----

Many people think that the spree he went on after Vesper’s death was about avenging her. They are wrong. He is angry, not at her, but at himself, for falling for something so easily deduced. It is a cleansing, of his mind and of his body. As he kills and takes down parts of the organization she was part of, he strips part of her from his soul. 

It is the greatest euthanasia he has ever felt. When it is done he knows it is time to begin planning.

\----

James does not begrudge M for telling Eve to take the shot. It was the kindest thing she has ever done for him. He sequesters himself away in a remote beach town. Regroups, and builds himself back up. Then when he feels he is strong he takes to disguising himself. Just enough pills and drink to make himself shaky, but not enough to make himself vulnerable. He gets to know the bar owner, all the gamblers, and rowdy men. A story will not stick unless there is a spark of truth to it. It was one of the lessons in the books his father used to leave him. 

When the telly shows the video of MI6 exploding, James knows it’s time to return. To give M what she thought she gave him - hope, and then take it all away. 

\----

Raoul Silva is everything he never expected, in him James sees the second half of his soul. There is a shared history between them, of betrayal. Silva talks about how M left James for dead after the fight on the train, but James knows Silva doesn’t know how deeply it really goes. But then he doesn’t know how deeply M’s betrayal of Silva goes until later either. 

When Silva touches him, something that Vesper left dead ignites, but it’s more than that. As the hands drag along his legs, bringing him to full hardness, it takes him a moment to understand what it is. In Vesper he saw the chance at freedom, in Silva he sees freedom, but he also sees revenge. They are two things that should not exist together, after all one who takes revenge is never truly free. But the two paradoxes come together in this man. In the hand that strokes his bullet wound. 

He understand in that moment, that he never truly knew lust until now. Vesper is a shadow of what this is. What this could be.

\----

Together they travel into the warm sunlight. Silva challenges him to save Sévérine, but James never cared about her anyway. 

His hand shakes, but not because of the pills or the drink, but because it must if Silva is to buy his act. When he misses Silva shoots Sévérine dead anyway.

Good, James thinks, there is no room for love in revenge. Tries to convince himself of this even as the sun makes Silva’s hair glow. He wonders if Silva thinks the same.

\----

Glass cage and a story between them and James knows that Silva will not be an accessory. He cannot use and discard the man like that, not when he has been through so much. When M leaves him a little free time he returns to the cage and sits in front of it, they are both silent for a long time, “If you get your vengeance, what then?” James asks.

“I dream of an ocean.” Silva says after a lengthy pause, “But things always end messy for us dear James.”

“An ocean?”

“Don’t you dream of home?”

James does. He dreams of sloping hills and his house, but his house is always on fire. When he wakes from that dream he always dreams of water, of enough water to put out the flames that she put the spark too. 

The sound of waves carry him to where Q types on his computer, carries him into subway tunnels and to the courthouse where Silva tries to kill M.

Eventually the waves carry him home. 

\----

Between preparing the house for war and the quiet moments before everything explodes, James finds the list. Hiding inside of his father’s journals, it’s worn and turning yellow. On it are a few names, some he recognizes and others that he doesn’t. The journal entry eventually reveals that it’s the names of all the people who had anything and everything to do with his mother’s death. The name of the spy he met recently, Mallory, is on it, as is M’s. He folds the list up and puts it his coat pocket. Out the window he can see car lights, it’s showtime.

Time to put this home behind him. He must to continue the work his parents set out for him, and this home has lived it’s last. 

\----

Ice cracks under his feet and he watches at Silva leaves. The man could of had him killed here but he hadn’t. Instead he dances under the water with one of Silva’s many subjects, breaks the man’s neck, clean, with little fuss. He hopes he can dry the list in his pocket, and if not, his memory has not let him down yet. The waters part around him as he swims to the surface and pulls himself out. His body is wet and cold, but the embers of his home ablaze carry him to the door of the church.

Before he enters he stops and looks back at the graves of his parents. They would be proud he thinks. He will pour every act of vengeance done to them into this one act.

\----

“Put the gun down Silva.”

Silva turns, using M’s body as a shield. Whatever plans he had for homicide and suicide disappearing in an effort to protect himself. James sees his finger trembling on the trigger, “Do not think to stop me James. You are weaponless.”

They stand there for a moment, each waiting to see whose resolve will break first. Silva’s finger jerks and James lets the knife he was concealing fly.

There is small gasp, followed by a moment of silence and then M slips from Silva’s grasp, the knife embedded into her stomach. Silva looks at him, stunned perhaps, “You missed.”

“Never.” He walks over to where M is staring at the ceiling, eyes glassy. She is still breathing but barely, “I want to look into your eyes one more time madam. May my parents death not be in vain.” he hisses the word out with venom. Turning he looks at Silva and smiles, “I apologize for taking your kill for you.”

Some part of him expects Silva to break down but he does not. In the end they truly are more alike than they are different. He knows that Silva will grieve, but perhaps he too knows that the woman he loved once is long dead, “I loved her cruelty. I will miss that most.”

“Ah.” Perhaps not.

\----

In the end they leave together. It is not a conscious choice, but they both cannot imagine doing anything else. They escape to São Tomé and rent a tiny island house. For a little while things are quiet, but both of them are made for movement. James finishes putting together the rest of the list of people responsible for his mother’s death. The list had been lost to the water in the end. James puts the pen down. From inside he can hear the sound of Silva working on his computer.

He walks into the home they own and pushes the computer aside, Silva looks up at him put upon at having his work interrupted, “That was my - ”

Truthfully James has gotten bored of waiting. The feeling of Silva’s hands still linger on his legs, “Do you remember our first encounter?”

“How could I not dear?”

James sinks down on his knees and strokes down Silva’s legs in a mirror of what Silva once did to him, “Shall we begin where we started?”

“And after?”

“I’ve got a list of people who need to be taken care of.”

“Hm. Sounds like fun.”

“Good.”

He begins to unbutton the clasps of Silva’s pants. After truly will be interesting.


End file.
